We all try to make the bathroom in our home as hygienic as possible and we clean it very often, but when it comes to computer keyboard, it’s not that we clean it every once in a while. There’s some sort of urban legend that says a PC keyboard can have more bacteria than a public bathroom, but how true can that be?
We assume that a keyboard is not cleaned, far from it, every day (not every week or every month, the most frequent is to clean it at most twice a year), whereas a bathroom is generally clean if not daily, relatively often. When we talk about public toilets, it goes further, and the most normal thing is that they are cleaned several times a day, every day.
How many bacteria can a keyboard contain?
According to a study by Swinburne University of Technology in Australia, PC keyboards can harbor large amounts of bacteria, and this is even more true for keyboards shared by several different people, such as those in an office. This is complemented by a study by researchers at the University of Arizona, USA, who found that the average office has up to 400 times more bacteria than a toilet seat.
After a study conducted at Northwestern Memory Hospital in Chicago, USA, a group of researchers discovered that there are two types of bacteria that can be deadly and are also drug resistant, Enterococcus faecium and Staphylococcus aureus, which are capable of surviving up to 24 hours on a PC keyboard. There is a third type of bacteria, more common but less harmful, called Pseudomonas aeruginosa, which can only survive for an hour on a keyboard.
Most of the bacteria that can be found on a keyboard comes, of course, from the human being itself, and is usually found on the skin and on the mucous membranes of the mouth and nose. So, in all likelihood, most of the bacteria that can land on the keyboard comes from users’ hands.
Is a bathroom more hygienic than your own keyboard?
Although most bacteria that land on a keyboard won’t harm you unless you have a weakened immune system for some reason, they could cause an infection if, say, you have a small cut on your fingers. For this reason, it is advisable to take a few precautions beyond more frequent cleaning of the keyboard, such as always washing your hands before using it, or not eating “on top” of the keyboard (apart from the crumbs that can fall out and get dirty, will probably pass bacteria from your mouth to the keyboard).
Therefore, and answering the question and this “urban legend” that we mentioned at the beginning, indeed a public toilet is normally more hygienic than the keyboard of a PC, since it is cleaned with abrasive products which regularly disinfect all bacteria, which does not happen in keyboards.
